“What’s the deal with this weather?” he said. “There I was, planning to go skiing in Berchtesgaden, but I bet there’s less snow there than there is here!”
The room was sweltering. A large suitcase stood next to the door. From the radio came the velvet voice of Jean-Michel Damian wrapping up his show: “That’s all from me for this evening, but stay tuned to France Musique for jazz with Alain Gerber…”
Only after he had ushered me in did Alexis Clément notice the crowbar.
“What the…” He stared, wide-eyed.
This was no time for hesitation or discussion.
The first blow came almost by itself, as though someone had swung the bar in my stead. It hit him squarely in the chest, knocking the wind out of him and sending him reeling. The second smashed his knee. He howled.
“How dare you touch her, you fucking creep?”
Alexis reached for the counter that divided the room from the kitchenette but it collapsed with him; a pile of plates and a bottle of San Pellegrino crashed to the floor. Still I did not slow down.
I was completely out of control. By now Alexis was sprawled out in front of me, but I continued to beat him mercilessly. I rained down blows furiously, urged on by something I could not stop. Blows with the crowbar gave way to kicks. The images whirling in my mind of this bastard raping Vinca fueled my rage. I knew I was doing something that could not be undone, yet I could not regain my self-control. Caught in a spiral of violence, I was now the pawn of some malevolent, vengeful god.
I’m not a murderer.
The words echoed inside my head. Faintly. The prospect of a way out. A last wake-up call before the point of no return. Suddenly, I dropped the crowbar and stood, paralyzed.
Alexis made the most of my hesitation. Summoning all his strength, he grabbed my leg, and my slippery shoes made me lose my balance and fall to the floor. Though badly beaten, he scrabbled on top of me in an instant, turning from prey to predator. He leaned his full weight on me, gripping me with his knees so that I couldn’t move.
I opened my mouth to scream, but Alexis had already picked up a broken bottle. Helplessly, I watched as he raised his arm to drive home the shard of glass. Then time disintegrated and I felt life ebbing away. It was a second that seemed to drag on for several minutes. A second that would change the course of many lives.
Then the world sped up again. A crimson stream of warm blood splashed across my face. Alexis’s body slumped, and I managed to extricate one arm from under him and wipe my eyes. When I opened them, everything was blurry, but looming above the figure of the philosophy teacher was the shadowy figure of Maxime, the blond hair, the Adidas tracksuit, the gray baseball jacket with red leather sleeves.
7.
Maxime had needed only a single stab, a quick thrust with a glittering blade no bigger than a scalpel that looked as though it had merely grazed Alexis Clément’s jugular.
“We have to call an ambulance!” I screamed, scrabbling to my feet.
But I knew it was too late. He was already dead. And I was covered in his blood. It was on my face, in my hair, on my shoes. There was blood on my lips, on the tip of my tongue.
For a moment, Maxime and I stood there, exhausted, drained, devastated. Unable to speak.
It was not an ambulance we needed to call. It was the police.
“Wait! My father might still be on campus,” Maxime said, snapping out of his daze.
“Where?”
“Down by the caretaker’s lodge.”
He raced out of Alexis’s apartment, and I heard him hurtling downstairs, leaving me with the body of this man we had just killed.
How long was I left alone? Five minutes? Fifteen? In the enveloping silence, I felt as though time had stopped. I remember standing by the window, my nose against the glass so I would not have to look at the body. The tremulous surface of the lake was now plunged into darkness, as though someone had flipped a switch. I tried to focus on something, anything, but I was lost in the iridescent snow.
This dazzling abyss was our future. I knew that our lives had been changed forever. I knew this was not a new chapter, not the end of an era—this was the gaping maw of hell blazing from beneath the snow.
Suddenly, I heard a sound on the stairs and a door slamming. Francis Biancardini stepped into the room; he was followed by his foreman and Maxime. Francis looked as he always did; his gray-streaked hair was disheveled, his paint-spattered leather jacket strained to enclose his barrel chest and potbelly.
“You all right, son?” he said, looking me in the eye.
I was in no fit state to answer. His hulking form seemed to fill the whole room, but his careful, feline steps contrasted with his thickset figure.
Francis stood in the middle of the floor and slowly surveyed the situation, his stony face betraying not a flicker of emotion. It was as though he had always known this day would come. As though this was not the first time he had dealt with such bloody carnage.
“Okay, from here on out, I’m in charge,” he said, looking from me to Maxime.
I think it was in this moment, as I listened to his calm and measured voice, that I realized that the crude, proto-fascist mask he wore in public was a cover for his true personality. Right now, the man towering over me seemed like a ruthless gangster, like someone out of The Godfather—but if there was even the faintest chance that he could help us, then I was ready to pledge my allegiance to him.
“We’re going to clean this place up,” he said, turning to Ahmed, the foreman. “But first, go and get some tarps from the van.”
The blood had drained from Ahmed’s face and his eyes were wide with fear. “What’s the plan, boss?”
“We’re going to concrete him into the wall,” Francis said, jerking his chin toward the corpse.
“Which wall?” asked Ahmed.
“The wall of the new gym.”
5
The Last Days of Vinca Rockwell
1.
May 13, 2017
“I never talked to my father about it ever again,” Maxime said, lighting a cigarette.
A ray of sun caught his lighter, a Zippo in a lacquer case with a reproduction of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. We had left the stifling atmosphere of the gym for the heights of the Eagle’s Nest, a narrow, flower-strewn ridge that ran along a rocky outcropping overlooking the lake.
“I don’t even know exactly where he walled up the body.”
“Don’t you think maybe this is the time to ask him?” I said.
“My father died last winter, Thomas.”
“Shit…I’m really sorry.” The shadow of Francis Biancardini loomed over our conversation. I had always thought of Maxime’s father as indestructible. A rock on which all those foolish enough to attack him met their fate. But death is an exceptional adversary. It always wins in the end. “What happened?”
Maxime took a long drag off his cigarette. “It’s a pretty grim story,” he said. “In recent years, he had been spending a lot of time at his villa in Aurelia Park—you know where that is?”
I nodded. I knew the opulent gated community in the hills above Nice.
“Late last year, there was a spate of burglaries in the complex, some of them pretty violent. The burglars often burst into the villas in broad daylight when residents were there. There were a number of home invasions where they tied up the victims.”
“And Francis was one of them?”
“Yeah. Over Christmas. He always had a gun in the house, but he didn’t have time to use it. He was tied up and beaten by the intruders. He died of a heart attack brought on by the beating.”
Burglaries were one of the many plagues of the Côte d’Azur, along with the concrete sprawl, the permanent traffic jams, the crowds brought by mass tourism.
“Did they ever catch the guys who did it?”
“Yeah, it was a Macedonian gang, really well organized. The cops caught a couple of them and they’re behind bars now.”
I leaned on the guar
drail. The rocky half-moon terrace afforded a stunning view of the lake. “Other than Francis, who else knew that Clément was murdered?”
“You and me, no one else,” Maxime said. “And you know my father, he wasn’t the type to talk.”
“What about your husband?”
Maxime shook his head. “Fuck no, that’s the last thing I’d want Olivier to know about me. I’ve never talked about what we did to anyone.”
“What about Ahmed Ghazouani, the site foreman?”
Maxime looked skeptical. “I don’t know anyone more tight-lipped than Ahmed. And besides, why would he have talked about it when he himself was an accomplice?”
“Is he still alive?”
“No. He got cancer and went home to Tunisia to die.”
I put on my sunglasses. It was almost noon. From high in the sky, the sun beat down on the Eagle’s Nest. Ringed only by a wooden guardrail, the place was as dangerous as it was beautiful. The students of Saint-Ex had never been allowed to come up here, but being the son of two deans, I had special privileges, and I remembered spending several magical evenings here with Vinca, smoking and drinking mandarinello as the moon glistened on the lake.
“Whoever’s sending us those messages has got to know what we did!” Maxime said. He took one last drag on the cigarette as the glowing ember reached the filter. “Did he have any family, this Alexis Clément guy?”
I knew Clément’s family tree by heart. “He was an only child, and his parents were pretty old even back then. They’re bound to be dead by now. Besides, that’s not where the threat is coming from.”
“Who, then? Stéphane Pianelli? The guy’s been trailing me for months. Since I started campaigning with Macron, he’s been investigating me from every angle. He’s dug out old case files about my father. And he wrote that book about Vinca, remember?”
Maybe I was naive, but I could not imagine Stéphane Pianelli going this far to flush us out.
“He’s an interfering hack,” I said, “but I don’t see him writing anonymous threats. If he did suspect us, he’d splash it on the front page. But he did mention something that got me worried—that cash they found in the old locker.”
“What are you talking about?”
Maxime had missed the news story. I summarized it: the floods, the discovery of a hundred thousand francs in a sports bag, and the two sets of fingerprints, one of them belonging to Vinca.
“The problem is that the money was found in what used to be my locker.”
Somewhat bewildered, Maxime frowned. I explained a little more.
“Before my parents were appointed deans at Saint-Ex, I had a dorm room here for a year.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“When my folks were hired, they were offered housing on campus, and they insisted I give up the room so that another boarder could have it.”
“And you did, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but the guy who took the room never used the locker and never asked me for the key. So I kept it—not that I had much use for it. But a couple of weeks before Vinca disappeared, she asked me for it.”
“And she didn’t tell you she was planning to stuff it full of cash?”
“Obviously not! I completely forgot about the locker. Even after Vinca disappeared, I didn’t make any connection with her asking me for the key.”
“When you think about it, it’s unbelievable that they never managed to find a trace of her.”
2.
Maxime pushed himself off the drystone wall and took a few steps to join me in the sunshine. He echoed something that I had heard several times that morning: “Thing is, we never really knew who Vinca was.”
“Of course we did. She was our friend.”
“Okay, then, we knew her without really knowing her,” he insisted.
“What do you mean?”
“Everything points to her being in love with Alexis Clément—the letters you found, the photos of them together…you remember that photo taken at the winter dance where she’s making eyes at him?”
“So what?”
“So why would she claim a couple of days later that the guy had raped her?”
“You think I lied to you?”
“No, but…”
“Spit it out, Maxime!”
“What if Vinca is still alive? What if she’s the one sending us the messages?”
“I thought about that,” I said. “But why would she?”
“Revenge. Because we killed the guy she loved.”
“For fuck’s sake!” I exploded. “She was terrified of him, Maxime, I swear. She told me. In fact, it’s the last thing she ever said to me: Alexis forced me. I didn’t want to sleep with him!”
“She could have been high. She was a bit of a druggie back then. She was dropping acid and taking any other shit she could get her hands on.”
“No.” I drew a line under the discussion. “She said it twice. The guy was a rapist.”
Maxime’s face was expressionless. For a moment, he stared at the lake, then he turned back to me. “At the time, you told me that she was pregnant.”
“Yeah, that’s what she said. She even showed me the test.”
“If that’s true, and if she gave birth, her kid would be about twenty-five now. There could be a son or a daughter out there trying to avenge the father’s death.”
The idea had occurred to me. It was a possibility, but it struck me as more fantasy than reality, the sort of twist you might find in a second-rate thriller. Which is what I said to Maxime, but he did not seem entirely convinced. I decided to tackle the subject that seemed most important right now.
“There’s something else I need to tell you, Max. In early 2016, when I was about to fly back to the States after a tour promoting my new book, I had a run-in with a border control officer at Roissy Airport. This asshole thought it was funny to humiliate a trans woman, calling her ‘monsieur.’ The whole thing got pretty heated, and I was in custody for a couple of hours…”
“They took your fingerprints!”
“Yeah, I’m in the police database. That means we don’t have much time. If they find a single fingerprint when they dig up the body and the crowbar, my name will pop up and I’ll be taken into custody and questioned.”
“What difference does that make?”
I told him what I had decided on the red-eye flight the night before. “I won’t mention you. Or your father. I’ll take the blame. I’ll tell them I killed Clément and I got Ahmed to help me get rid of the body.”
“They’re never going to believe you. And besides, why would you do it? Why would you take the rap?”
“I have no kids, no wife, no life. I’ve got nothing to lose.”
“No, it doesn’t make sense,” he said, shaking his head.
There were gray bags under his eyes; his face was crumpled, as though he had not slept in days. Far from reassuring him, my suggestion had only made him more jittery. I pressed him and found out why.
“The cops already know something, Thomas. I’m convinced. You can’t get me off the hook. Last night, I got a call from the Antibes Precinct, from the chief of police himself, Vincent Debruyne.”
“Debruyne? Like the former public prosecutor?”
“Yeah, his son.”
This was not particularly good news. In the 1990s, the Jospin government had appointed Yvan Debruyne public prosecutor to the Nice District with the stated purpose of putting an end to political racketeering on the Côte d’Azur. “Yvan the Terrible,” as he liked to be called, had arrived in a blaze of glory like a knight in shining armor. He’d held the post for more than fifteen years, waging war against the Freemasons and corrupt elected officials. Many were relieved when he finally announced his retirement. A lot of people in the region loathed Debruyne and his bravado, but even his critics admitted that he was fiercely tenacious. If the son took after his old man, we would be dealing with a shrewd, stubborn cop with an innate suspicion of elected officials and anyone remotely connected to
Macron’s campaign.
“So what did Debruyne say exactly?”
“He asked me to come and see him urgently, because he had a few questions for me. I told him I’d drop by this afternoon.”
“Well, go as soon as you can—that way we’ll know what the situation is.”
“I’m scared shitless.”
I put a hand on his shoulder and summoned all my powers of persuasion in an attempt to reassure him. “You haven’t been issued an official summons. Maybe Debruyne’s been brainwashed. He’s probably fishing for information. If he had any concrete evidence, he would have acted on it by now.”
Panic oozed from every pore in Maxime’s body. He opened the top button of his shirt and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I can’t go on living like this. Maybe if we tell them the whole story—”
“No, Max! Try to hang in there, at least until after the weekend. I know it’s tough, but someone out there is trying to scare us, to throw us off balance. Let’s not walk into the trap.”
He took a deep breath, and with considerable effort seemed to regain his composure.
“Let me do a little digging of my own,” I said. “Everything’s up in the air right now. Let me try and find out what happened to Vinca.”
“All right.” He nodded. “I’ll go to the precinct and I’ll let you know how it goes.”
I watched as Maxime walked down the rocky steps and along the path that wound its way between tall thickets of lavender, his slim figure growing smaller and hazier until it finally disappeared, engulfed by the mantle of purple.
3.
Before leaving campus, I stopped in front of the Agora, the curved glass-and-steel building that encircled the historic library.
The midday bell had just rung, and students were beginning to stream out. Although an ID card was now required to access the lecture halls, I avoided the problem by hopping over the turnstile, a trick I had seen performed in the Paris Métro by vagrants, cash-strapped students, and presidents of the French Republic.
The Reunion Page 6